Service providers (SPs) primarily act as service portals, offering a variety of services either using in-house solutions or through partnerships with various third party business services. In many instances, these business services act as services/content providers (CP). To enable provision of a particular service or content, a SP might interact with only a single CP or might leverage a composite workflow involving the invocation of multiple third party CPs. Examples of such interaction between SPs and CPs are presently observed in both the Internet service providers and telecom/cellular service provider markets.
At present, SPs primarily depend on static business contracts with their CPs to enable service delivery. Usually, third-party services are tightly integrated into an SP-proprietary platform, based on custom APIs. Such a “walled-garden” IT model is restrictive, however, as it does not enable either the SP or the individual CPs to leverage the benefits of a competitive, market-driven service infrastructure. This problem will become especially acute with the adoption of universal service interface standards (e.g. such as IBM's Web Services Inspection Language 1.0, and the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Services Description Language 1.1 and the UDDI Consortium's Universal Description Discovery and Integration Specification), which enable the invocation of services using a standard language and platform-independent format that encapsulates all implementation-specific details.
From the SP's viewpoint, the use of static contractual agreements prevents it from being able to dynamically select among competing content providers (CPs), based on changes in customer profile or context or on the performance profile of individual CPs. From the individual CP's viewpoint, the adoption of standard service invocation mechanisms allows it to associate and peer with multiple, usually competing, SPs, and thereby expand the CP's reach without an unacceptable increase in its service implementation and management costs.
In R. M. Sreenath and M. P. Singh, “Agent-based service selection”, Journal on Web Semantics (JWC), 2003, a system is disclosed that assumes that there are (peer-to-peer) user communities within the system. A user selects a service from a pool of alternative services based on the peer recommendation. Agents act as proxies for peer users. The winner service is determined by a weighted average calculation of the recommended ratings. After service use, the user scores the service providers based on the service quality perceived by them and adjusts the weights of the other peer users whose recommendations led to the selection of that particular service provider. The scoring by the user (based on his experience with the service) and the rating of other users acts as a feedback loop to the service selection system, helping the user the next time he/she selects the service for the same task. Sreenath describes rating and scoring of services based on evaluation.
In summary, while mechanisms for dynamic service discovery and ontology-based composition are known, what is of interest is mechanisms and processes by which a SP can monitor the performance of such services and base the dynamic selection of CP services on such monitoring and higher (business) level policies, and on context.